Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday September 25, 2009 @11:32AM
from the wrong-on-so-many-levels dept.

TechDirt is running a piece on Corona, CA, where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras — cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take — in order to increase the city's revenue. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued for "California stops" before a right turn on red, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes the apparent unconstitutionality of what Corona proposes to do: "The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal."

On the subject of red light cameras, if they become administrative violations, IMHO, the right solution is to simply not pay them. The DMV almost certainly won't refuse to renew your license for such administrative violations because the law only allows parking violations and a few other things to be handled in that manner.. As such, the tickets probably have no teeth unless you do other business with the city and they have laws that would allow them to refuse to do other business with you until you pay the fees.

"On the subject of red light cameras, if they become administrative violations, IMHO, the right solution is to simply not pay them. The DMV almost certainly won't refuse to renew your license for such administrative violations because the law only allows parking violations and a few other things to be handled in that manner.. As such, the tickets probably have no teeth unless you do other business with the city and they have laws that would allow them to refuse to do other business with you until you pay the fees."

That is how they are trying to get away with the red light cams in the New Orleans/Metairie area..the administrative approach.

I had heard one person recently, had done what you suggested, and did not pay...and is suing to get out of them.

I need to check back in on this, but, last I heard, there was a lawsuit to have the cameras removed as being (state) unconstitutional, in that every traffic law is supposed to be enforced equally, and since they don't have these cameras on EVERY redlight in the state...they are illegal to have in the few they do have.

This just goes to show, you can't count on big companies to do what's right. If there were more freedom and openness, we'd be a lot better off. Between Microsoft's FUD and Apple's fanboys, it's a wonder anything gets done.

Hopefully, once people realize what's going on and the Pirate Party gains ground and push back the anti-evolution religious nuts, everything will be much better.

There, that should milk a few karma points no matter what Slashdot article this comment ends up under.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

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It's great that this source will be open for study, at least at this early stage, but it's very likely to be locked away under copyright and/or patents by the time it becomes useful.

If you believe that barrelfish, midori and singularity are "new technology" then you don't have a clue about what has been done in the tech world. Microkernels? Done. OSs based/written in managed code? Done. Capabilities-based OSs? Done.
What Microsoft is doing is reimplementing old concepts on Microsoft's own technology (C#, CIL, etc) and then using the test code that has been produced by those projects as a marketing tool. So when Windows is known to be plagued with security bugs and, therefore, viruses... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new singularity project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to security. Very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant. So when Windows is known to have lacklustre support for multi-processor/multi-core systems... Well, here comes Microsoft's marketing division clamouring this new barrelfish project, armed with it's press release which announces that Microsoft is building from the ground up an OS entirely devoted to multi-core systems. Once again, very convenient to dispel criticisms but still very irrelevant.
After all, although they announce so many of these research projects, all Microsoft is able to dump into the market is a series of Windows NT clones. So why is this even news?

Well, if Microsoft's new OS can handle multi-core, multi-processor transparently for the applications, and if all the developers need to do is to recompile their apps on the new system, and voila, everything is transparently distributed across the cores/processors, then I'll be the first one to welcome it.

Multi-core/processor programming is hard. The thing I found quite elegant in Erlang is that it makes it so transparent that you don't even think about it. Imagine an OS with a "normal-looking" set of libra

The big problem with MS's experimental OS's is that they never make it to production. IIRC all of the OS's they've ever actually sold were Purchased from someone else (or outright copied in the case of DOS), and then 'extended'. To my knowledge, none of their experimental OSs have ever actually see production, and I have little reason to believe that they ever will.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but their research division does a hell of a lot of genuine innovation.

I don't think so. I'll give them credit for trying really hard and for having a huge budget though.

Can you give a few examples of really original research? Everything I've seen was either trivial or a rehash of old mainframe ideas. Not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with old mainframe ideas but it's hardly 'genuine innovation'.

.net is their only real innovation that comes to mind. I think you are over playing the innovation card though, MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.

they know exactly what people want and they cater to it, which is what OSS still doesn't get after much posturing.

In what way is.net an innovation? It's not an innovation without being new in some way.

MS's real strength is in their ability to take technologies and make them easy to use, consistent and reliable.

No. Their real strength is marketing, sales, strongarming hardware suppliers, and consumer ignorance. Their software isn't easier to use or more consistent than anything else and it certainly isn't more reliable. Actually it is shockingly unreliable.

Ever had to deal with active directory? Chain crashes of multiple machines do happen and application level errors often cause a blue screen and leave no logs to indicate what went wrong. In big environments bugs like that cost a few million a day and they happen every day. Companies pay a fortune just to cover things like that up, it happens everywhere.

Ever seen a virus wipe out over a thousand production servers in a day? I have on windows but never on anything unix based.

Ease of use is their no 1 selling point, no one comes even close. If there were easily deployable and maintainable alternatives to their products they would at least start penetrating the small business market, which is where easy & cheap are the king.

Ever wonder why Random Small Company uses Windows stack all the way when they don't _really_ need full blown Active Directory, Exchange & SQL Server? It is not because they're stupid and don't know better

Indeed. It's a selling point, but that doesn't make it true. It's just what their marketing claims and what people that don't really know IT believe because they have little other information on which to base their choices.

You claim it's easier to deploy windows and I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that total cost of ownership, including additional costs like downtime are higher with windows in almost every case and in many cases they are a great deal higher. Losing the use of email or losin

.net is innovative in the sense it's a worthy competitor to java. while you could argue.net isn't truely innovative because it fills the same niche that java did years before, you'd be vastly understating the work that went into the.net framework and not understanding how they've done things differently. remmeber innovation isn't finding new problems, it's finding new solutions to problems.

To answer your question i use AD daily at work - it's fine. i haven't ever had a single problem with it going back

I think the 'Genuine Innovation' bit comes in when they lie about having done it first in some huge expensive marketing campaign.

Can you provide an example of this ?

I can provide a few.

MS-DOS was QDOS brought and rebranded. MS didn't create it yet they told everyone they did.

The windows desktop environment was a mac or PARC or X clone, not sure which. It wasn't new but they pushed it like it was.

The Windows NT OS was reimplementation of VMS and UNIX systems, only not done nearly as well as either. They called it NT for New Technology and marketing it as the stable 'business' alternative to dos based windows.

Excel was a Lotus 1-2-3 clone. The pivot tables accountants love so much were copied from Lotus too. They sell their office package like crazy but they didn't develop the core of it.

Word was a wordstar clone.

Internet Explorer was a mosaic clone. Although MS are giving it away for nothing they are still marketing it like crazy.

Active Directory is just a LDAP clone. They market it as something which will solve all the worlds problems.

Microsoft is far to big to change direction. They are a marketing company trying to wring every last penny out of windows and related tools. They have never been a technology company and trying to change now will do nothing but burn vast sums of money. Windows is obsolete and they know they have to replace it but they will never be able to come up with anything better.

They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects. Sadly they can't think like that.

I am always amazed that people can be both assertive and utterly wrong. I despise Microsoft, for a variety of reason, but that isn't a reason to be blind at their qualities:

> Microsoft is far to big to change direction.

Internet, WindowsNT, XBox are counter examples. Microsoft is one of the most agile company out there. A lot of dead [wikipedia.org] / moribond [wikipedia.org] companies [wikipedia.org] and a lot of [wikipedia.org] products [wikipedia.org] are there to serve as a warning to others [google.com].

> They have never been a technology company

I beg to differ [amazon.com]. It is possible to argue that their are not a technology company anymore, but not that they never were

> They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects

To build an OS that they would get no benefits of ? Wtf? And why does MS would need a new OS ? What is wrong with the current OS model ? They need better apps, they need better subsystems, they need to remove cruft and to clean up stuff, but the core OS is still fine for its uses and can be improved by evolutions.

They just need Microsoft Research for a few things, mainly:
* To prevent people working here from working elsewhere, where they could create and apply disruptive technology.
* To get ideas that may or may not integrated into products (given the origins of the talking paperclip, the latter may be better)
* To have a better time-to-market IF they needed to produce something due to some disruptive tech appearing from competitors

Giving cash to university and keeping their hands off the projects obviously wouldn't make any sense

In what way(s) is Windows obsolete and which competitor(s) are more advanced in each particular case?

You seriously expect me to spend about 12 hours documenting every possible use of windows? I have better things to do. Although not much computer administration because I scripted it all. Try scripting things on windows, it's clumsy and awkward.

Joking aside, I manage IT for a fairly large internet based "small business" (80-100 employees, couple thousand online clients, real time operations). We use pretty much everything, and I am willing to try whatever new comes along. There are places I go for cheap, there are places I go for easy, and of course there are places I go for fucking rock solid and gimme two of them.

Most places I go for stuff that works today, tomorrow, and every day and never, ever causes me to get phone calls at 2am. Sadly thats never possible with windows servers so I stay away from them where possible. They break randomly, the security updates break applications randomly, they reboot sometimes when you really don't need them too.

SQL Server never, ever, failed me

It failed me. When one person created a VPN bridge from his home computer to work and 50 of them started throwing out UDP traffic at an incredible rate. It upset the network guys so much they just started disabling ports until the their problem went away.

It was more of a programming language than an Operating System, but ERLANG has the stuff to do multi-core, well. Using ERLANG, they've actually achieved nine nines of uptime. That works out to well under a SECOND of downtime in a year. It scales (near) linearly as the number of cores go up, IO is the limitation.

You can read all about it here. [pragprog.com] Concepts like message passing and immutability is what makes it work.

Erlang actually lets you update the program while it's running. It has extensive error recovery. It's lack of shared state means you can not only go multi-core, but multi-system over networks - invisibly.

Seriously, It's the cat's meow for ultra-high-end high-performance, industrial-grade software solutions. If I were writing a stock exchange management system, I would probably consider ERLANG.

It's a little hard to determine whether this is actually about discrete multicore systems, or heterogenous clusters. Sure, a single conventional machine is likely to have both CPU and GPU, but it's less likely to have x86_64, x86 and CPUs. So to some extent, I suspect heterogenous clusters. In the case of a single box, this would come across as a massive prototyping effort simply to avoid supporting an open-tracked standard (OpenCL).

When Microsoft wonders why Mac is perceived and cool and Windows isn't take a clue from their naming conventions. Barrelfish vs Snow Leopard. Can you spot the cooler name? After Vista flopped the marketing department went out and got drunk and said "aw fuck it, we'll just call the next one Windows 7". Just kind of feels like they really aren't even trying.

Time to upgrade to Vista/Win7/Server2008, then. Now it's all C:\Users\.

Application Data seems to have been renamed AppData, amongst other things... except the old directories still exist. Only if you try to access them you get an Access Denied error, so I guess they're only pretending to exist. Kludge upon kludge for backwards compatibility?

I would like something that is a combination of Inferno/Plan9(styx is nice) and Erlang as a stand-alone OS. Throw in any other cool features for good multiprocessor and high performance clustering and fault tolerance. (Although if Erlang-like, I would like some better syntax, it's a little hairy). The idea of being able to scale to 20 million threads on one system efficiently with Erlang is intriguing, although I estimated that it would take about 48GiB of RAM to just have the stack data. But that's not so bad, it's pretty easy to find an affordable server motherboard that can accept 64GiB of RAM. (installing all that RAM is moderately expensive though)

Isn't it a shame that after all the hard work the devs put into great ideas like this at MS, once the accountants and marketers get their hands on it it comes out the doors like Vista! There's something seriously wrong with the workflow in that company...

Vista in my eyes brought about the changes to Windows that needed to happen. It was the adolescence stage of Windows IMO, and the result is a matured Windows 7 that's hit the ground running. Sure Vista was painful at the beginning, but it shaped up and turned into a respectable OS in the end, and now W7 is bearing the fruit of that as pretty much all the reviews have stated.

Before Vista; Windows really was quite immature (and I refer more to the "Windows way" of doing things more than the tech capability) .

I think that somehow/. just got rebooted into single-article mode. All the comments and all the stories are merged together. Maybe it's a cost-saving measure, cutting down on use of electrons and such...

(Red light story) - PA already does it in many cities/villages. You are required to pay a $50 non-refundable 'administrative' fee in order to be able to present your case to a judge and the judge will usually give you a reduction on the fine even if you have a good case (cop always wins). Given that the fines are somewhere between $75 and $150, it's not even worth going in.

NY does it also in large cities. You don't even go to a judge anymore, you go to an administrator at the Traffic Violations Bureau who decides how much you have to pay, no plea bargaining, no judges.

I think one way to fight this is to use the approach that some cyclists use in the "Critical Mass" approach to cycling safety.

If a grass roots protest was formed by simply stopping at ALL red lights and waiting for a green would soon gridlock traffic. Until the tickets go away for turning on red, not turning on red to avoid the new tax is the solution to show the impact it has on drivers. Stopping for the red and waiting for the green saves you the ticket as well as the line behind you.

"Look, if you wanted to talk about pet care, you should've called two weeks ago when our show on racism was airing. Okay, I'm doing a show about the elderly right now, which of course, to people watching means: call in about cooking..."

"The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. T

Could someone send a copy of the applicable amendments and supporting court decisions to Washington State? Moving violations have been considered "administrative violations" here for years. WA state does things a little differently; they don't require you to admit guilt. Guilt has nothing to to with paying/not paying a fine. They also employ someone who is nominally a judge to handle contested violations. But at the outset of the "trial" they state that it is not a trail, rules of evidence do not apply including the municipalities need to prove a case. Other than the semantics, it sounds just like Corona's system.

Could someone send a copy of the applicable amendments and supporting court decisions to Washington State?

No, they can't - because they don't exist. I don't know of anywhere in the country where traffic violations (that is, those that don't count as misdemeanors or other criminal violations) are treated as criminal violations - which do require a trial by jury. IOW, the OP is just making shit up.

But anyway, concerning Corona, CA, it should be noted that some blogger linked to by TechDirt is no better a legal scholar than... anyone else, apparently. There's no Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial to "shred" for traffic violations, or any misdemeanor involving less than six months or so of jail.

"where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras -- cutting the state and the county out of their portion of the take -- in order to increase the city's revenue."

If this doesn't convince you that it's NOT "all about safety" then I don't know what will...

I've seen an ATW at work in the late 80s. My Archimedes could calculate a mandlebrot set in about 30 seconds, a PC needed several minutes for that. The ATW could zoom in and out mandlebrots _in real time_ and one fly through them like through a 3D-world, I was really stunned when I saw that.

Transputers had 4 HW links -- those are probably the easiest part to replicate in current processors.The difficult part is the threading model: Transputers had their own thread model. Scheduler was hardwired in silicon, together with a couple of dedicated instructions. SW could not tell the difference between a local and a remote communication. Efficient, but not very flexible in terms of OS architecture.

The transputer programming model had the major problem that CPUs could only talk to their neighbours. So your software had to do all the marshaling when data needed to go several hops. This adds uhm, quite a bit of code.

"Marshalling" means converting data structures into byte streams. No, you didn't have to do that multiple times. The term you're looking for is "routing". Routing can be abstracted into libraries and the OS; no need for every application to worry about it. It was just that the Transputer (as well as a lot of other system software development) was killed when Microsoft monopolized the market.

Hasn't anyone noticed that on current hardware, this message passing scheme is almost useless, as the memory is still shared on multicore devices. Any large array of devices without shared memory are generally Linux clusters, where the message passing occurs down the ethernet ports, so it sounds like M$ are researching how to compete more than anything else. (Or perhaps they intend to be patent trolls at some time in the future.)

Yeah turns out this problem is really hard and, depending on how you formalize it, uncomputable. What it boils down to is that the system needs to know how long it will take to run a program on itself and how long it will take to spin it off into another thread.

Sound familiar? It should; that's halt.

Of course, approximating it well is an interesting research problem in language theory, but I wouldn't expect a general purpose system in actual production use any time soon. Even doing it in a pure, strongly ty

why is this modded flamebait!? Is it because Jurily spoke for you by saying "everyone"? Whatever.

The difficulty with "the web" or "modern web standards" is that the problems aren't primarily technical in nature. The problems are a political, emotional, or philosophical struggle...involving different technologies (not even taking into account corporate/patent greed).

As far as I can tell, the problems involved with developing standards for data exchange are not simply a mathematical problem waiting for the

The "exception" is that they are pretending that this is not a fine for a crime, but instead is a fee for a non-crime interaction with the govt. You don't need a jury trial to tell you that [any non-criminal interaction with the DMV or court clerk or registrar] is going to have a fee attached to it. They are trying to put this "fee" for keeping your driver's license after a violation in the same category as the fee for getting your driver's license in the first place.

In the US (not all the state I think), there is turn-on-red which means you can always turn right (provided you are on the most right lane) but you must yield if the traffic light is red. Turn on red is the common thing and it is specified when it is forbidden. Whereas in France, the opposite is used : you can not turn unless the right green arrow is lit.

I believe the rule is turn on red in the US because the roads are new and built with good visibility. When there is no visibility turn on red is forbidden. Whereas in France at most intersections turn on red would be dangerous due to the lack of visibility. Therefore turn on red is the exception.

"Turn-on-red", as far as I know, does not require you to yield (ie, slow, and stop only if there's opposing traffic of higher priority), but to actually stop first, and proceed with the turn only if it's safe to do so.

In California, home of the rolling stop, we also have many double right turn lanes at the end of freeway offramps, where the the two rightmost lanes are for right turns. Californians have come to behave (erroneously) as if a right on red is legal from either lane. Rather than educate the drivers, cities have begun installing NO RIGHT ON RED signage at these intersections.

Where is such a turn prohibited in the vehicle code?

21453(b): Except when a sign is in place prohibiting a turn, a driver, after stopping as required by subdivision (a), facing a steady circular red signal, may turn right, or turn left from a one-way street onto a one-way street. A driver making that turn shall yield the right-of-way to pedestrians lawfully within an adjacent crosswalk and to any vehicle that has approached or is approaching so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard to the driver, an

We have green right turn arrows here. They mean it is safe to turn right on red without stopping. They only light if there should not be any on-coming traffic and the pedestrian light is "Don't walk". Otherwise, unless posted, one can turn right on red, provided one follows the same rules you have listed.

Well, moving violations should theoretically be either criminal, or the entire road system privatized (hey, it wouldn't be any worse than the special grade of government corruption plus private contractors providing maintenance) to separate moving violations from criminal violations properly.

Of course, you could argue for the reasons behind jury trials - the end results of a criminal trial can literally ruin your life. Let's say you lose your driver's license to multiple false moving violations - unlikely,

If it isn't, and the amount at stake is over $20, Amendment VII provides it.

The bolded portion is wrong. Amendment VII only provides the right to a jury in civil suits, not in all non-criminal trials.

The distinction is important because at the time the Constitution was written there was a difference between petty crimes and so-called criminal offenses--the former were not afforded a jury trial under common law, while the latter were.

While petty crimes are, today, lumped in with criminal offenses in many ways, the distinction still remains when it comes to determining whether a jury trial is required or not.

The problem is that only by an extremely strict interpretation to red-light cameras violate the constitution. What people aren't saying here is that under the Sixth Amendment theory, all red-light cameras, speed cameras, photo radar, doppler radar and LIDAR systems violate the Sixth Amendment because you can't cross-examine a radar gun. Or a red-light camera. If that is the device that is actually accusing you of speeding, what are you supposed to do?

A better question is: Is not having to choose between getting a ticket or slamming on your breaks at a newly shortened yellow light cycle and being rear-ended really that important to you?

Or how about Is it really so important to you that the city/state (and by extension, insurance companies) raise more money that you are willing to take measures that have been shown to INCREASE the number of traffic accidents? Is it really worth it to burden people with hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of tickets for